Such methods for distributing energy and such home energy management systems (HEMS) are already known from the prior art and serve not just to produce but to influence the flow and the distribution of energy. Renewable energies which provide varying amounts of energy over time are promoted for energy-political reasons. The amounts of energy generated thus are fed to the power grid, as a result of which the available energy is subject to varying prices over time. Furthermore, electric vehicles are promoted by the state in many countries for environmental-political reasons. Therefore, the situation arises that different amounts of energy are offered at different, prices over time and consumers require in part strongly varying amounts of energy over time. Thus, for example, a charging electric vehicle requires large amounts of energy over a relatively long period of time while a hairdryer requires only small amounts of energy over only a short period of time, whereas a building air-conditioning system in turn continuously requires slightly varying amounts of energy. Furthermore, consumers in part, have energy sources themselves, e.g. photovoltaic installations, said energy sources being able to provide varying amounts of energy over time.
Therefore, it is known that home energy management systems divide the available amounts of energy among energy consumers according to certain criteria. These known criteria include, inter alia, a rigid prioritization; thus, for example, a building air-conditioning system always has priority over a charging electric vehicle. Alternatively, it is known to uniformly divide the available amounts of energy among all energy consumers. Finally, it is likewise known to distribute the available amounts of energy according to the “first come, first served” principle, i.e. the first requesting energy consumer is provided with all the energy that is required and the remaining available a mount of energy is divided among the remaining energy consumers according to the sequence of the requests. These methods have many disadvantages. By way of example, it may be the case that a consumer requires mobility at certain times and therefore the charging of said consumer's electric vehicle benefits from a high priority at certain times but not at others, or that, in the case of mild temperatures, a building air-conditioning system can also be operated with reduced energy requirements but this is not possible in the case of significantly higher or lower temperatures. In each of these cases, a central unit or central intelligence, which may also be implemented in terms of software, decides alone about the distribution of the available amounts of energy without the energy consumer being able to influence this and, as a rule, without knowledge about why an energy consumer requests a certain amount of energy at a certain time or for what reason said consumer requires this energy.
International standards and protocols, for example SEP 2.0 EEBus or ISO 15118, were developed to standardize the data exchange in such home energy management systems. However, these standards or protocols have a restricted area of use and regulate the energy distribution by a central controller with a predetermined distribution logic in accordance with the aforementioned criteria, i.e. without information items about the states of the connected energy consumers being transmitted to the central unit.